GRAVENHURST, ON ― In what he describes as the fourth-best day of his life so far, local man Matthias Lane had a chance to meet his hero, Blue Rodeo vocalist Jim Cuddy, after a concert Saturday.
Though their conversation was brief, Lane did get to take a selfie with Cuddy, joining the ranks of thousands of fans whom Cuddy does not remember meeting, but who will never forget meeting him.
Many of those selfies show fans wearing Blue Rodeo merchandise or wearing homemade “#1 fan” T-shirts, all but one of which are inaccurate. However, Lane is pictured in a plain shirt.
“I’m no idiot,” Lane explained. “Blue Rodeo is my favourite band. I own all their albums, I know all their lyrics. But so do a surprising amount of other people, some of whom have also memorized all the band members’ full names, dates and places of birth, and go-to pizza toppings. I can’t compete with that.”
Elaborating on this last point, Lane added that a fan has to break into Cuddy’s bedroom at least 14 times just to crack the top 5000, and he, specifically, would then need to blow Cuddy twice to make up for that time when, early in his fandom, a teenaged Lane identified “Ahead by a Century” as his favourite Blue Rodeo song.
While he surmises that hundreds of Saturday’s attendees couldn’t distinguish between “5 Days in July” (an album) and “5 Days in May” (a song), he acknowledges that many had him beat.
“Like that lady a few places ahead of me in line? She said she was never going to wash her hand again after shaking Cuddy’s. Now, that seems a little unlikely to me. I’d wager she’ll go about 79 hours before giving in. But that’s still a hell of a lot longer than my 26 minutes and 11 seconds. I was hungry and ate a burger, and what, was I supposed to just walk around covered in sticky dried ketchup for the rest of my life?”
For any public figure with a statistically significant fanbase, the #1 fan title goes to their mother 83% of the time. In the remaining 17% of cases, the figure’s mother is either dead or has given birth to Elon Musk.
At press time, Lane was making plans with a woman he met at the concert, who he believes is “possibly my one and only, assuming you discount all the parallel universes where I decided to study abroad after all and met an even more perfect woman in Germany.”
